Successful practitioners plan and execute best practices continuously while always striving to find ways to enhance and hone their professional skills.

This was the lead statement by Greg Stafford, ReSound Strategic Account Manager, during our recent Business Partner Summit, where he discussed the benefits of creating a consultative sales process or approach. Today, we will define the benefits and introduce you to each step in a consultative sales approach. In the coming weeks, we willdeep dive into specific steps to further your understanding.

ReSound’s structured consultative selling approach – Consultative Patient Care or CPC – helps you to systematically guide your patients to understand the seriousness of their hearing problems, the implications involved, and the pay-offs that come from adopting amplification early-on upon diagnosis of hearing loss. Hearing centers that use a consultative sales approach within their sales process achieve much higher closure rates and typically are more profitable overall. More importantly, their patients understand better the need for and implications of moving forward with amplification.

At a high level here are the 7 steps:

Step 1: Establish credibility with the patient (5-10 minutes)

Step 2: Define the evaluation steps for the patient (1-3 minutes)

Step 3: Gain patient commitment to proceed

Step 4: The consultation process (45 minutes)

Step 5: The close

Step 6: Complete purchase/service agreement/payment (5-10 minutes)

– Steps 1-6 take about 60 minutes total –

Step 7: Delivery and fitting of the product (30-45 minutes)

It is worth noting that it is important at the strategic level to take a step back before creating a consultation sales approach in order to evaluate your current approach. Define what your current process is and what goals it meets. You might find it falls short of your intentions. Also, determine how you currently measure its success. Are you training to gain staff buy-in and consistency and are you applying across all patients?

Check back on August 6th for a deep dive into Step 1 and 2 of the consultative sales approach.